Miró Quartet with Composer Kevin Puts
The Excitement of Opening Night
Fri., October 12, 2007 / 8:00 PM

Daniel Ching and Sandy Yamamoto, violins; John Largess, viola; Joshua Gindele, cello

“World-class musicians” – World News Tonight (ABC News)

“Playing of this caliber casts light on the path ahead.” – The New York Times

“ Miró concert superb in every way” -  Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The dynamic Miró Quartet, one of America’s highest-profile chamber groups, has risen to the top of the international chamber music scene in only a decade, captivating audiences and critics around the world with its youthful intensity and mature interpretations.

The Miró Quartet, founded in 1995 at the Oberlin Conservatory, met with immediate success, winning first prize at the 50th annual Coleman Chamber Music Competition in April 1996, and taking both the first and grand prizes at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition two months later. Earning first prize at the 1998 Banff International String Quartet Competition, the Miró Quartet also won the prestigious Naumburg Chamber Music Award in 2000. In 2005, the Quartet was the first ensemble to be awarded the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant, and received the Cleveland Quartet Award that year as well.

The Miró Quartet has been Faculty String Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Texas at Austin for three years.  Its members – violinists Daniel Ching and Sandy Yamamoto, violist John Largess, and cellist Joshua Gindele – teach and coach chamber music there, while maintaining an active international touring schedule.  With the Miró on campus, the University of Texas at Austin is one of only a small group of universities whose faculties include a world-class string quartet.

One of the high points of the Miró Quartet’s 2006-07 season will be playing the New York premiere of one of its newest commissions – Leonardo Balada’s Caprichos for Guitar and String Quartet with Eliot Fisk, one of the world’s greatest guitarists.  The December 1 concert marks the first appearance of the group in the esteemed series of concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Further season highlights include an October residency at the University of Pennsylvania and a return to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

The Miró Quartet recently launched its new web site, www.ClassicalLounge.com, the first online networking community for classical music lovers and an initiative of Miró cellist Joshua Gindele. Gindele states: “Through our teaching and touring, we meet people all over the world who share our love of music. This site will give us all a place to gather as a global community of classical music lovers.” Through the website, the Miró Quartet will share downloads of its performances, touring itinerary, and inside information from the road. It is the Quartet’s hope that other artists will follow suit and use ClassicalLounge.com as a way to share recordings and to keep fans up-to-date on its activities.

In addition to its two New York City concerts and campus residencies, the Miró Quartet performs this season in Austin, TX; Urbana, IL; Winston-Salem, NC; Pittsburgh, PA; Greenville, PA; Kingston, RI; Buffalo, NY; Urbana, IL; New Haven, CT; Rockville, MD and elsewhere.  Its repertoire ranges from Arriaga, Haydn and Schubert to Dvorák, Bartók, Shostakovich and Leonardo Balada, whose new Caprichos it will perform numerous times.

Recent Miró Quartet seasons have included concerts in some of the world’s most important concert venues, such as Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Berlin Philharmonic’s Kammermusiksaal, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, and at the Dresden Music Festival. The Miró Quartet has been Quartet-in-Residence at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Two, and was named to the Distinctive Debut Series of Carnegie Hall, which provided for a local concert and debut appearances in Cologne, Stockholm, Brussels, London, Vienna, Amsterdam and Athens. The ensemble made its Tokyo debut in 2001 in a concert benefiting families and victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The Miró Quartet has been heard on numerous national radio broadcasts, including National Public Radio’s Performance Today and Minnesota Public Radio’s Saint Paul Sunday. Internationally, it has been featured on radio networks across Europe, Canada and Israel. The Quartet has also been seen on NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s World News Tonight and on various programs of the Canadian Broadcasting Company. At the invitation of Isaac Stern, the Quartet performed in a live broadcast at the Jerusalem Music Center in Israel and was featured in the PBS-TV “American Masters” documentary “Isaac Stern: Life’s Virtuoso”.

The members of the Miró Quartet have a strong dedication to the next generation of musicians and were on the faculty of the Hugh A. Glauser School of Music at Kent State University, where they taught private students and coached chamber music. The Quartet has also been the Resident String Quartet of Kent/Blossom Music, Kent State’s annual summer chamber music festival, in cooperation with the Cleveland Orchestra. On short notice, the Quartet filled in for both Isaac Stern and Henry Meyer, leading master classes in Switzerland and Germany. In 2001 the Quartet and composer Brent Michael Davids joined with the Grand Canyon Music Festival to form the Native American Composers Apprentice Project, which teaches Native American students how to read and write music. The Miró Quartet also serves on the Advisory Council of Community MusicWorks of Providence, an organization dedicated to enriching the lives of Rhode Island’s inner-city youths and families through classical music.

The Quartet’s devotion to contemporary music has led to the commission and performance of music by such composers as Brent Michael Davids (whose quartet it performed at Carnegie Hall last season), Leonardo Balada, Maurice Gardner, Ezra Laderman, Chan Ka Nin and David Schober.

Last year the Miró Quartet released the first of a planned series of recordings of Beethoven Quartets – the six works of Op. 18.  The group intends to perform and record the remaining ten quartets over the course of several years, when the players are more or less the same age as Beethoven when he wrote them.

The Quartet has recorded music by George Crumb and Rued Langgaard – the performance of Crumb’s Black Angels receiving international acclaim, including the French “Diapason d’Or”.  The Quartet plays Mendelssohn’s final string quartet (Op. 80) and Schubert’s Quintet in C, with celebrated cellist Matt Haimovitz, on an Oxingale CD titled “Epilogue”.

The Miró Quartet is named for the Spanish artist Joan Miró, whose surrealist works – with subject matter drawn from the realm of memory and imaginative fantasy – are some of the most original of the 20th century.

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